A short time ago, Moz released the 2014 Industry Survey results. We collected data from over 3,700 marketers spanning more than 80 countries around the globe.

Thanks to new analysis tools from Survey Monkey we are able to slice the data many different ways to gain insight into the demographics, tools, and tactics of online marketers living everywhere. One popular data set we wanted to examine in detail is the salaries of online marketers.

Transparency in salary data helps everyone make better decisions, and knowing the factors most associated with changes in salary can help you advance your career.

The average salary of online marketers

If you include all 3,700 respondents in our analysis, we arrive at a average salary calculated from the midpoint of the survey ranges:

Note that the almost half the respondents, or 49.1%, were from the United States, which greatly influences this number.

Things start to get interesting when we break down salaries by country. Here are the average salaries of the countries with the highest number of survey participants. All salaries are converted to US dollars.

Australia leads the pack in online marketing salaries, with the United States close behind. (For many countries, the number of responses were too few to draw a conclusion with any statistical confidence. For example, the data shows Japanese marketers are very well paid, but only three marketers from Japan responded to the survey.)

Update: In the comments below, marketers from India have indicated the figure of $26,724 seems way too high for that country. It's certainly possible, as the the lowest option on the survey was $0-$30,000, and we used the midpoint of that range for calculation.

Apparently, the salary buckets we designed with our mostly Western audience are not one-size-fits-all.

Here is the raw data for India only, which might paint a more accurate picture.

Answer Options

Response Percent

Response Count

< $30000

63.2

134

$30,000-45,000

9.9

21

$45,000-60,000

3.8

8

$60,000-75,000

1.9

4

$75,000-100,000

1.4

3

$100,000-150,000

0.9

2

$150,000-250,000

0

0

> 250000

0.9

2

I'd rather not say

17.9

38

Salary by role / job title

We also broke down salary by the specific field and job title the marketer worked in. No surprise, engineers commanded the highest salary, closely followed by user experience professionals.

It's unfortunate to see web designers and social media professionals make less than the average salaries. These are extremely valuable roles that often garner outsized returns in company investment. Hopefully the perception of the value of these jobs begins to change.

What is surprising is to see SEO and content professionals in the middle-lower portion of the pack.

It appears that the more skills you add to your toolkit, and the more you become a T-shaped marketer, the higher your long-term earning potential.

Salary by years of experience and age

If there is one factor that seems more closely tied to your earning level than any other, it's the number of years of experience that you have.

Folks working over 10 years in the industry blew everyone else out of the water. This trend was consistent across all job types and all countries examined. The longer you have worked in the field, the more you make.

Another consistent earnings trend is age. Simply put, older online marketers tend to have higher salaries than younger folks, who presumably have less experience on average.

The survey did have a couple of respondents under the age of 18 who reported earning more than $100,000 per year. Although we have every reason to believe their claim, we lacked enough data points to make a confident conclusion.

The gap: salary by gender

Although women have made great progress in joining the ranks of online marketers, as an industry we still have a ways to go in terms of pay equality.

For reference, the number of female respondents in 2014 was 28%, up from 21% when we ran the survey in 2012.

On average, those same women earned more than $10,000 less in salary than their average counterparts.

When we compare men and women by how long they've worked in the industry, a pattern starts to emerge which might help explain the gap.

The chart below graphs percentage of all men and women against years of experience. While online marketing is still a male-dominated industry, in the past the imbalance was even worse. Hence, for today at least, more men have more years of experience behind them.

If this explained it, we would expect women and men to earn roughly equal salaries for equal years of experience. In reality, this isn't true.

While women marketers with between 1-3 years of experience actually earn slightly more than their male counterparts, the salary gap increases dramatically as the years of experience rise.

As the chart below shows, a male marketer with between 5-10 years of experience earns an average of $15,000 more than a female with the same amount of experience. The gap grows even larger with 10 or more years experience to an amazing $30,000 difference between men and women.

Let's hope these numbers start to shift, especially with the increasing number of women now entering the field. It's hopeful to see the younger generation actually pull ahead of male salaries in many areas.

Salary by education

How much does formal education play a role in your salary?

Hopefully not much, when you consider that one of our founders dropped out of college just two classes before graduation.

While having a doctoral degree pays off (hat tip to Dr. Pete), the benefit of having a master's degree compared to a 4-year degree is almost nothing. This is an industry were the successful are largely self-taught, and most people continue to learn by experience, which is likely why experience seems to play such a heavy role in compensation levels.

In the future, as more colleges and learning institutions offer programs in online marketing, we may see a time when a person's degree plays a more significant role in salary potential than it does today.

Note: An earlier version of the post referred to salary medians. In actuality, the calculations reported reflect weighted averages of the medians within each salary range. Hence, the term "average" more accurately reflects how we calculated salary figures.

I was hoping to see average salary in "whole" Asia but when I saw the figures I was like "oh, well...". However, it's nice that Cyrus pointed out that our industry is mostly composed of self-taught professionals the fact that I'm no college grad and yet I have more than 4 years of internet marketing experience.

Yes, passion is the key and that makes us Filipinos "versatile" professionals :)

The data is reliant on the honest responses from a bunch of marketers who are used to talking up themselves and the businesses they work for. I'd knock 5% - 10% off those figures for the spin factor straight away.

Simply WOW for the "Salary by Education Level" statistic! So, you're basically saying I should've not completed High School and gone right into marketing/internet marketing and been relieved of all the debt?

That is very interesting result from the survey and shows that with some skills you don't necessarily need a HS or college diploma, Masters, Ph.D., etc to be successful or make a good living. I graduated with a BS, Exercise Physiology and went straight into the IT, web, software, internet marketing world, with lots of debt right after graduation.

We also need to work on the "Salary by Gender" gaps to begin to close those down. I never understood how a female doing the same job as a male made less income. It's not logical.

I believe the "Salary be Education Level" discrepancy you mentioned is because those people are ones who have started their own business. This would definitely be good data to have (Are they owners, employees, agency, in-house, etc.)

It would be interesting to see that more in-depth data, but these higher level views are important to see from the 3,700 participants (myself included). I started my company, just as soon as I could once I knew I could do it, unfortunately it took a few post-graduate years in the field :)

Im attempting to enter into the Internet marketing field and have been looking into courses such as Market Motive and Full Sails internet marketing degree. I realize the best way to learn is through working and doing it but in order to get your foot in the door wouldn't it be easier to at least have some form of certification if you have no experience, also any advice on which course to go with?

Amfrato, I wouldn't waste time with either of those schools for an internet marketing degree. You'll just rack up some extra debt and not have a whole lot to show for it. My advice would be to try and get your foot in the door at a local agency and work the trenches for a year or two. IMO, actual work experience goes way farther than a 2 year degree.

The data for India is seriously, well and truly, skewed, as anyone who has spent half a day in the country can tell you.

Some facts:

The per capita income (nominal) in India is roughly $1,500 compared to $50,000 in the US. Given that online marketers in the US earn 1.6 times their national average at $80,000 a year, their Indian counterparts must be far smarter (10.8 times to be precise) because they make an astounding 17.3 times their national average at $26,000 a year.

As per the raw data, 206 out of the 248 respondents from India said their annual income was less than $30,000. What did you take this number to be when calculating the average?

Of the 42 Indians in the $30,000+ bracket, only 13 have more than 5 years’ experience. I hope for our sake that they’re being honest. Three of these purport to be business owners. I’d like to assume the rest are high-level employees of Western firms and are temporarily based in India.

22 out of the 40 who earn anywhere from $30,000 to $150,000 have less than 3 years’ experience in internet marketing. That is downright laughable.

There’s a genius who claims to take home >$250,000 with 2-3 years of experience. Doesn’t happen anywhere in the world. He probably doesn’t know what the symbol above 4 on the keyboard means.

$100,000 is equivalent to 6.3 million in Indian currency (INR). To put that in perspective, the annual salary of the Director of Yahoo! India is somewhere between INR 4.8 million and 5.2 million, according to Glassdoor, where he’s at #22 on the list of the highest paid Indians.

248 records out of a total of 3,768 make 6.5% of your data questionable. I suggest you disregard these and republish the results. You shouldn’t have included India in the first place, because it’s akin to adding peanuts to a list of coconuts or something.

The quality of work and professionalism is totally lacking in the Indian subcontinent. Facts don't lie. The exact numbers could be way off but the relativity of the compensation in India with that of other nations make total sense from the data provided here.

This is true for the majority of those in the workforce.

At the same time there are some very smart people as well but they may not be more than 5% of the total workforce.

That gender gap data is pretty disturbing, kudos to the Moz team for digging into that (not that I would expect anything else).

I also find it really fascinating that people with less then a high school diploma make more then all other education levels except a Ph.D. While I can see why that would be true in a lot of situations, I'm wondering if there is sampling bias at play.

I agree. I would love to see respondent breakdown based on education. I bet we would find 2 respondent less than a high school diploma--one making $100,000 and one making $87,250 (100,000+87.250)/2=$93625

I'm curious to see the sample sizes for each field, since it might tell us something about how the demographic distributions in the online industry compare to others and what the outliers are.

I'm also fascinated by the social media, PR, and content role salary data. Does this suggest that these are commoditized skillsets? Every web marketer I know thinks they could do a decent job at these even if it's not their main specialty.

I think social media advertising is becoming more and more complex, so you need a special skill set to be effective in that market. One of my colleagues specialises in social, especially Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin advertisements. It's definitely a growing market.

That spike for doctoral degrees - anything to do with a high proportion of PhDs/DPhils being engineers and analysts rather than, say, designers? Just want to make sure no designer goes out and starts looking for a PhD thinking it will bump him up to the $100,000 mark ;-)

Thank you Mr.Cyrus and Moz for compiling up this useful data. I'd say the overall demographic distribution of salary is also directly proportional to the economical condition of of that part of the world as well.. For instance, in my country Pakistan as our economical condition is not very much up to the mark that's why India is ahead us.

As far as the educational and age references are concern, I'm quite surprised to see the degree factor is influencing our industry now which most of the people won't agree. Age Factor is digestible because of the fact that usually as the person grows he tends to move towards setting up their own businesses or agencies.

Can't stop laughing after seeing this chart...This the very much far than reality. I said this line because I know the salary graph of online marketer in India. In India, bosses makes excuse to pay you. They know the UN-employment rate so offers a few money to you. :) i know it's strange, but it's true.... :(

Totally agree with you, this is not the reality in India. The reports says that the median salary is $65,766 i.e. 4095,906.48!!!!!! I wonder if any IM person in India is getting this much salary. The salary in India will be even less than 13% of median salary mentioned by Moz.

Even for experienced person with high technical ability and knowledge, he/she will not get more than 17% of median salary.

You may have a point. The lowest option on the survey was $0-$30,000, and we used the midpoint of that range to calculate the median. So it's quite possible so many respondents earned significantly less than that figure.

Yeah.. it seems these numbers are pretty far off and will make the majority of people feel that they are underpaid : ). The main thing I would want to know is whether they are self-employed, employed in-house or in an agency setting. This would provide the best comparison. Downloading the data to see if that was collected.

Can you explain how you arrived at $65,766? What was the 'midpoint' of the $250K+ range, for example? And if you're using the midpoint of each range and taking the median of those, wouldn't you just arrive at one of the midpoint figures?

Yeah, I was amazed at the first conference I went to by how few college grads there were in attendance. I have some colleagues that have digital marketing degrees from pricey tech schools and they all advised against it, saying that the curriculum is outdated and outpaced by the constant evolution of online marketing.

Salary comparisons/studies/data gathering always make me smile and ponder: what is the point?
-As demonstrated by many comments- they are rarely correct and never mirror the reality.
On this occasion labels of the job descriptions are missing and it does make a big difference: What is included in the job spec of a SEM very much depends on the size of company and the role given to you and in my world the salary bracket for this role is way above PPC and Inbound Marketing.
As per Countries, I first hand compared similar roles/salaries between the UK (where I mostly work), France and Italy and the gap is huge to say the least.

I live in Manila, and for it not to be not included in the list of countries and corresponding salaries mean that typical salary of online marketers here are pitiful. Hopefully, pay improves in the future to entice more Filipinos into joining the online marketing field.

Thanks for the data. This is very interesting and I hope the salaries and industry continues to grow at a very fast pace as it has done in the last decade. It was interesting to note the employees with masters level degrees did not average that much higher salaries than those with 4 year degrees. I wonder if that will begin to change as more specializations and classes geared to Digital Marketing are now starting to be offered at the graduate level.

I'd just remind people that these figures don't take into account the cost of living in each place. Australia may have the highest salaries, but (from what I understand), it is also very expensive to live there. To get a clearer picture of the "life" of a digital marketer in these countries, I'd cross-reference it with any of the online resources available that show the average prices of everyday goods, housing, and more. Not to mention the average inflation in those locations and whether salaries keep up.

In the United States, for example, salaries in New York City are a lot higher, but a lot of people have better lives (at least monetarily) in the "middle part" of the country when all factors are taken into account.

I did Uni, college etc. (yawn) but I would truly say that to succeed in this market place you learn at the coal face! I don't remember every learning about digital marketing techniques, tactics you name it (fell asleep learning about the 4Ps or is it 7 now?).

It's been working and learning from people (like the folks on this site), trial and error (and some more error) and making it work. Oh and especially having the right attitude, drive/tenacity, humility but with a sprinkling of self belief! I say that out to people who think you need a certificate on your wall to do well. Great to have but not the end of the world if you don't.

Intrigued by the 'Less than high school' salary figure of $93,625.00 - is the an example of my above views.

Thank you Cyrus for a detailed insight! I figured out that the salary ratio in India is way better than in Pakistan.
The only chart that surprises me was the salary by education level :) I am not sure if I call it a dilemma or not but somehow people with less education managed to get bigger salary packages.

Obviously this needs a thorough digging around in the data, but I'd say that the reason those people dropped out of high school was either to start an apprenticeship or to start building something. So although they don't have the school education of some others, they more than make up for that with their drive and self-education in their chosen field.

SEO, Web Development, and Web Design positions are paid less than marketing positions. Especially web designers being at the bottom, who I think now have a more important role with UX becoming more and more important!

Are people really getting these salaries in seo? Last year many companies stopped their seo business just becasue of the less profit in seo. They didn't even had money to pay for their employs. And many others left their jobs because of less salaries. Don't you think this data is Kolaveri Di ( Surprising )?

There are people who do well in this field from India, if you have US/Europe clients and target Europe and US market then SEO is a great business to be at this time with $ and Euro at the highest exchange rates. The main problem with Indian scenario is they this Internet Marketing/SEO is all about links, directory and article submission..(No offense) this has led to huge problems due to algorithm updates in 2013.

Thanks for sharing these figures Cyrus. It's very obvious that education level is not a big deal in the online market. What matters most to the customers is the years of experience and expertise of online workers for the said job.

Aside from the consensus that the India figures might be skewed (I, personally, have no idea), this was a pretty interesting little post. I do wonder though, within the "Content" category, is that for writers of content, content management, content companies? Being in the content industry, I'd love to know more about the breakdown there. :)

Lol, I would like to see how the real figures compare to the self-reported figures and have a good laugh. Not that I don't think these salary numbers shouldn't be the reality. At least this post might help give some leverage to anyone negotiating salary on a new job.

I think it would be relevant to include data like - cost of living vs wage... If you live in a capital city in australia you could expect to pay over 30k per year in rent easily on a 2 bedroom flat, food, clothes and entertainment is also quite high.

- On how many hours per week (e.g.36 hours) and how many weeks per year (e.g. 45) is the survey based in the Netherlands (if you don't have the exact number of the Netherlands, the general numbers would be fine to!).

Although I don't like that there are still differences between the salary of women and men I have to accept it because I know that we lie in an imperfect world where the discrimination will always exist.

I can say with almost Fact an SEO in Australia earns typically between 60-80K a year, of course experience and years at same job this likely grows. SEO manager will be in the 110-140K bracket. You can see this info on sites like seek.com.au ( employment search site ).

The most actionable metric from this research is understanding what to pay for new roles you recruit. To that end, this data doesn't help much unless broken down by country.

This is good data, but for having put so much effort into collecting the data I think it would make sense - and would be something unique and something people would link to even more - if you published an app (HTML5, JS, Flash, Java or whatever) with pivotal data so we can play with it. For instance when examining female/male bias, I would like to see it by country as USA, UK and India may differ significantly and skew results.

An alternative could be to just publish the data in Google Docs and let us derive our own conlcusions.

Thank you Cyrus for these insights. As I had thought when the data was released, although the gender gap is shrinking, we are not there yet in terms of salary equlity. It's encouraging to see that more women are entering the field and also actually entering with slightly higher salaries than men (might it be because of the current trend for women to go further in college education?).

As for the increasing gap that seems to come with years of experience, it may be a reflection of another general trend across industries, according to which women workers are less likely to ask or negotiate salary increases than men.

This is great, I really wanted to see the salaries broken down further by country and profession, and it would be cool to see it broken down further with sample size and the salaries broken out by the countries as well.

One thing that would be great for the future would be to not have a selector for salaries but have people type it in. Of course the numbers might get a little messed up and more people would be nervous about entering their info, but it could be a lot more accurate.

Overall, really awesome and I'm going to start digging into the raw data!

Very interesting report. As a broad generalization, it seems the more you work in analytics, technology, or bottom stages of the funnel, the higher the salary. Those whose job functions are, typically, at the top stages of the funnel receive less compensation. What do you think? Is this a reasonable takeaway? Thanks for providing the raw data file. Excellent.

That would in some part explain the salary gap increasing as time in the industry (experience) increases. If you have over 10 years experience then you're, what, 28-30 at a minimum. The likelihood of you having a child will increase.

I can't speak for other countries but here in the UK its still most common for it to be the female partner who takes maternity leave. One of the consequences of which can be - but not necessarily - missed promotion, earning and learning opportunities.

You could argue that quantifying 'experience' by years and then comparing across gender in fact creates a sampling bias issue. A better comparison may be to compare men and women in the same positions, although that creates its own problems.

This is because women don't negotiate as much as men. So naturally the more experience jobs would see the gap grow larger as those jobs have salaries more dependent on negotiating. Entry-level jobs will always just pay $40,000 or whatever they are. You can ask for more, but the response will be "It's an entry-level job. You only have a year of experience." They can get anyone to take it for that price.

But a job asking for 10 years of experience, well that could start with an offer of $100,000 and could go as high as $250,000. So, the better negotiator will get higher pay for the same job.

Great Survey... But Surprising things is in India you get better employee in Less Salary... Salary which is mention here for India, is only you can get if you are working on Metro cities of India likes Bangalore, Mumbai, Chennai & Pune. And even in these cities not everyone get the same salary, which you have mentioned. So Indian Online Marketing employees are far behind compare to other countries, Marketing Company In India just give the quote to their clients as per internation market, but offer very less salary to their employees, and our bad luck is there is no any fix salary structure defined by the Indian Government for private employers.

Informative post by Mr. Cyrus and Moz team for gathering this useful data but I am very disappointing to see that my country is not over there. When we look at demographic statistics then you realize how demographic is significant nowadays.

I am not surprise to see the degree factor in this trend because degree gives you knowledge about any subject either its Digital marketing or others but mostly people won’t agree on it. But one thing which is so important in career that is how you can push yourself toward your work.

Well I agree with Moosa Hemani, but still the information about India is still messy according to the Shaleish Jangra and wondering why did n`t they Provide the status of Pakistan. Anyways the detailed information is still very good keep up the good work, thanks.

Indepth Data and i can see the concern already in the above comments. Median salary can be set as a specific numbers, that would be better as Rand suggest. Pay in india is quite different as the data says. Just my two cents :)

Thank you for these figures, Cyrus. but i am surprise web analyst is getting more salary than SEO . after reading this post i am going to upgrade my designation from SEO analyst to Web analyst very soon. i think by doing this it will surely change the figures of my salary ... right @ cyrus ?? :)

After seeing this blog/chart…. I am very happy and I can’t stop laughing,,, and also very sad because I'm not getting this much of salary; is this true for those employ they are working in India? Because in India no single Internet marketing companies pay this much salary of any employs,, he he he he….. I know it is strange; but really this is true for India.

This is such a testament to people who find their passion very early on in their lives. A lot of talented coders around the world also haven't even graduated from high school. It's more common than you think.

Starting your passion early can be a very positive thing. Education is important too though! I really want to see digital marketing, SEO, PPC, etc. as possible electives in high school on a broad scale. That would be awesome.

I very much enjoy all the posts. And I really liked this one as well, however it seemed to show some rather unfavorable biases. So please, allow me to explain. The first surveys shares that online marketers make an average of 65k, but because I live in America it is increased to about 80k. Being that my job tittle is marketing and not VP, (per say) my salary takes a 7,000 hit and now I'm bringing home 73k. But being that I've been in the industry for more than 10 years were going to raise my salary by a whopping 50k, bringing it to a nice 123k. But wait, my age bracket survey decides I'm only worth half of that whopping 50k increase and lowers my salary to about 99k. SURVEY SAYS "momma should have had a boy "because wearing pink takes me all the way down to 57k. But thank god for that 100k my parents paid to send me to college because that pretty 4 year degree just bumped me back up to 67k which is right about where the very first initial survey posted my salary at $65,766.00. What a roller coaster! Being a woman at my age, regardless of my experience and education, cost me about 70 grand a year. That hardly seems fair. I'm just saying.....

The common reason women make less than men (and you see the gap go up as you go up in experience/pay) is that women do not negotiate as much as men. There have been some interesting studies on this. Check out Linda Babcock's Boggle study.

So, if you're a woman or know a woman, stress the importance of negotiating and asking for more money.

"It has long been argued that 'women don't ask,' the report states. We found little evidence to support this claim when considering career advancement strategies that rely on asking for opportunities. Women were more likely than men to ask for a variety of skill-building experiences, to proactively seek training opportunities, and to make achievements visible, including asking for feedback and promotions....In fact, the study authors offer another theory -- the problem is not that women don't ask, but that men don't have to."